Breadcrumb

Helen Burchett

PhD

Assistant Professor

My main research interests lie in the interplay between context, interventions and people, to understand how or why interventions may work (or not work). An area of special interest to me is the generalisability or applicability of evaluation research to other settings.

I have previously worked in the NHS as a Health Promotion Specialist, for an NGO called The Maternity Alliance as Public Health Policy Officer and as a researcher at the Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education. I have worked on systematic reviews, intervention evaluations as well as qualitative and mixed methods research studies.

My PhD, completed in 2010, explored researchers' and policy stakeholders' perceptions of the relevance of research to policy in Ghana.

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Affiliations

Department of Global Health and Development

Faculty of Public Health and Policy

Department of Health Services Research and Policy

Centres

Centre for Evaluation

Maternal, Adolescent, Reproductive & Child Health (MARCH)

Vaccine Centre

Teaching

I teach on the MSc in Public Health and am module organiser for Foundations for Health Promotion (distance learning).

Research

Recent research projects have explored reasons why some interventions are effective whilst others are not, within systematic reviews and intervention evaluations.

For example, one study analysed data from 10 intervention evaluations that introduced rapid diagnostic tests for malaria in six countries. Using data from process evaluations, study reports and insights from study teams, it explored factors relating to the interventions' contexts, content, implementation and experiences to understand why, in some places, the tests were well used and results adhered to while in others, they were not.

Another study, undertaken with colleagues at the EPPI-Centre, UCL, explored reasons why some lifestyle weight management programmes for pre- and primary-school children were 'highly' effective while others were not.